The House. The Legend

Part of the theme you have picked up about Dad is how when he decided he was going in on something, he was ALL in.

I don't know what Halloween looked like for him as a kid, or even as an adult before I was born, but by the time I was old enough to notice, it was clear his investment was high.  I'll just describe the house as it appeared upon approach, on the evening of October 31.

As you came up the block, you could hear an evil laugh coming from... somewhere?... it wasn't a recording, and it was pretty loud, nearly always getting startled screams from those up close even though they probably knew it was coming. And background music. Chains, ghosts, cackles, cats and dogs fighting, creaks, explosions... And oh yeah, for some odd reason you'd hear a car horn honk and more screams. Seriously, what the HELL is going on at that house?

Finally you were done at the neighbors, and it was... time... to approach 4317 South L Street.

Hanging from the lower outer edges of the enormous maple tree at the edge of the road, which easily enveloped the entire front yard with a dense overhead canopy, were these hanging lights. Two skulls, two jack o lanterns, spread out evenly in all four directions from the trunk. They would slowly, ominously, light up one at a time... and then all go out at once. And then you'd realize what else was wrong... it was so dark! There's supposed to be a lamppost in front of this house, but where is the light??

As you walked under the tree, you'd notice an ethereal unsettling light from up in the branches. A body, bathed in black light and wearing clothes painted in patches of fluorescence, slowly but steadily rotated at the end of a noose.

And the noises from the house, they just kept coming.

As you approached the steps, there, sticking out from the shrubs, on either side, were a pair of legs, each missing a high heel shoe and with slightly tattered nylon stockings. Poorly hidden bodies??!

Before you could process that, the loud evil laughter erupted, not in front of you as you expected, but from somewhere behind you, from the street or something!! So you'd run up to the stairs to the porch, the only lit area offering apparent... safety?

The scary sounds are here, but everything else appears... safe? C'mon, it's Halloween, this isn't so bad, right? So you'd press the doorbe--HOOONK! Two freaking bona fide car horns mounted behind you up high on the porch ceiling, hidden from street view, go off and scare you right out of your sneakers.

No longer confident the surprises are over, you watch warily as the door is opened and you are greeted by... A CLOWN. But it's a very nice clown, cheerful, friendly. And you were ready for the clown to suddenly go evil, but it never did. It just gave you candy and sent you on your way, leaving your body primed for another jump scare that never arrived, so you leave to see the next house with your tension on maximum and not released.

What a good, wholesome time! LOL

Mom and Dad split when I was seven. I was a little too young to do it all myself right away, but by the time I was about 10, I was doing much of this of this Halloween stuff myself. It was WAY more fun to run our house than to go out for candy!

The source of the scary sounds? In the house, hooked up to speakers on the porch, was piped-out spooky sounds and music from a 33RPM vinyl album, that would need to be periodically restarted. The scary album and turntable to play it on had not disappeared, so that was back in play. Incidentally, I just did a search on Amazon and of course the actual version we had is the current top pick. Click the link and read the track listing, lol. 

The scary street laugh I couldn't do, but the secret is revealed. Dad, being a HAM radio guy, had a receiver in his 1963 Dodge 330 (named Eloise, his version of Farley), and it had an accessory external speaker behind the grille. Using a handheld two-way radio inside (a rare thing for civilians to own in the late 1970s) he would key the mic and laugh like a crazed maniac into his radio, blasting it from Eloise and scaring the yagoobers out of everyone arriving at the house.

The lamppost was hidden with a heavy duty cardboard box that Dad had carefully modified to slip over the light. Ever safety and civic minded, there was a sliver in the back that allowed a little light to still make it to the street, but in the direction of the house, it was eerie dark from normal, seeing as how well it was covered with heavy fabric and painted black. That box was so well taped up that it lasted a very long time!

The hanging skulls and jack o lanterns were still present, and always put up. The lights were controlled by a gadget he had repurposed from an old readerboard sign with lights that used to be on an arrow, sequencing to show the direction the arrow was pointing. You could plug any four things into the panel he built with that gadget, and they would turn on, one at a time, until all four were on, and then they'd all go off and start over. Spread out on the maple tree, it felt random and unsettling, but in the context of an arrow lighting up slowly from one side to the other, it made perfect sense.

The mannequin legs were around for a while, but even I thought they were too creepy so I eventually stopped using them.

The hanging body in the tree was an old set of coveralls stuffed with gobs of old newspaper. The name on the coveralls was "Bob". Bob hung in our basement 363 days a year, only coming out for Halloween. Yeah, going down into our creepy old dim basement and having Bob down there wasn't emotionally scarring to us young kids or anything, I assure you. By the time I was old enough to hang Bob in the tree and run the black lights up there, the electric motor that rotated Bob had disappeared, and the black lights with it, so I just put Bob on the porch. Up close he was still pretty traumatic to behold, his disheveled curly brown hair wig, and his styrofoam face painted orange and his eyes these huge black empty sockets. Once, in later years after most of us kids moved out, Mom thought she heard something moving in the basement and called the cops, and they came to check things out. Bob scared the crap out of one of those guys and nearly got shot, to hear the officer tell the tale.

The doorbell horns were genius. This required some electrical trickery, because household doorbells run on 24 volts, but the car horns were 12 volt. To swap from doorbell to car horn required running a set of wire from the actual doorbell in the kitchen down to the basement, and 364 days a year those wires were coiled up in the rafters in the corner. On the big day, you had to disconnect one wire inside the doorbell unit up high on the kitchen wall, then go down to the basement, lug a car battery over to that corner, pull the coil down and clip those wires to the battery. Show time!

Over the years I modified the show a little bit, sometimes dressing up in camo clothes and makeup (Rambo was still big at the time) and jumping out of the bushes off the sides of the porch to startle folks, but kept most of the rest of those gadgets and decor going as long as I could before moving out.

Sadly, I don't know what happened to any of this stuff, but I suspect it got tossed when Grandma moved into the house on 54th Street, which you all know as the house where Super Pickle was always hiding.

But like anything else that Dad did, when he got sold on doing something, it got done to the fullest extent of reasonability, and for that reason our house was legendary year round, and at school we could sometimes hear kids who didn't know it was our house talk about our place to new kids in the neighborhood when the middle of October rolled around.

Good times.